“wtf… those two games don’t even go together”

“people are going to …”

It was fun while it lasted, but alas, yesterday was simply a joke. For those who didn’t catch it right away (or at all), there will be no void landing in Colorflys. Colorflys is a beautiful world designed by Tanna Tucker and the last thing I want to do is mess it up with programmer art.

Many of you may not be aware of my unsuccessful hit title, Project Void, a game where I pit you against a randomly generated void which must be filled with the use of shapes that oddly resemble those you would find in Tetris (cloned proudly).

Anyway, Return of The Void! I’ve been itching to release a content update for Colorflys and I can announce that it is right around the corner. ROTV will include unfamiliar elements that will challenge you to make even quicker, and more challenging decisions when capturing butterflies. Void shapes have landed and they’re here to protect the butterflies from being captured!

I recently went to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and learned a ton of amazing new things I wanted to incorporate into this update.

One of the biggest updates is an assortment of new in app purchases!

- The “difficulty ramp” is too burdening? Buy the fancy new “Invert the Void” machine to remove a random shape! If you’d like to choose the shape, purchase the “Invert The Void Directly” machine.

- Rather not capture any butterflies with your finger? Buy a sack of “Nets” to automagically capture the butterflies you need!

- Don’t like the strike system? No problem. $1 gets rid of this burden.

- Who wants to deal with playing the game at all? For $10 you can buy “Ransack Collector Bob” who will play the game for you, unlock all achievements and even award you a fancy medal for completing the game! You can even color the medal by unlocking the Color Wheel in the store!

I’ve conveniently placed a direct way for you to find these awesome new IAPs by placing a button on the lower-left corner of every screen.

I really hope you like the coming update! Stay tuned for more updates and please share the news to your kids, mom, grandma, social media friends and even your gardener (who I’m sure loves butterflies!).

What a blast. I’ve digitized my notes here.

I’ve heard a lot of bad things about attending sponsored sessions, but I decided to crack and go to one — the Simcity 5 talk on the Glass Box engine they’re building for their future simulations. Check out these videos of demos they showed in the session. I really love simulation games and am currently trying to find an idea to run with in iOS land. It was great seeing this behind the scene look and the way they’re tackling things these days (rule-scripts vs. random numbers).

Another fun session was by Kert Kartner who spoke about building trailers for games. He has a background in Visual Effects and has made some really awesome trailers. I’m fairly happy with the Colorflys trailer, but I picked up on a few new things to think about for my next trailer. One of them was on creating a story with your trailer. Introduce and set the scene, build toward a climax and then let it rip! Finally, end things and leave the person wanting more!

Best quote of the GDC? Failure is the tuition for success.

The lead designer from Space Invaders: Infinity Gene and Groove Coaster also gave a good design session which outlined 5 things he feels are important to design. Check out page 3 of my notes for those 5 principles.

Luke Muscat from Jetpack Joyride fame gave a great session on the making of. An interesting bit from this was that they shipped the game with @1x graphics (where they could) and had a script that converted those graphics to @2x when a player started the game with a retina device. Clever.

I really liked one of the last sessions of the conference by Matt Rix (Trainyard) and Semyon Voinov (Cut the Rope) on Level Design. Matt looks at level design as teaching and feels each level needs a purpose; evoking an idea and/or teaching something. Semyon has 3 goals; make the players smart, appeal to casual/hardcore players and keep players hungry. The principles he outlines were pretty good.

Overall it was a great GDC. This year I decided to kicked off the days with a 2.6mi run with a group of fine folks! That was a blast. I didn’t hit up a lot of events and instead hustled while I was at the conference. I’d love to see more game jam type gatherings in the evenings.

Thanks to the GDC ninjas who awarded me with an All Access pass for this.

So it appears that I will be heading to GDC. I’m stoked! Get in touch if you’ll be out there!

Done, sir, done! I recently pushed YieldKeeper to Apple.

My hope is that this journal will help investors on OS X who are just starting (students, amateurs) and experienced traders who are looking for a better way to keep an eye on their activity. There is nothing like this on the app store right now.

I’ve been a long term trader for the majority of the last 9 years. I’ve also been very active and traded on a daily basis. This is built by someone who was wanting something far friendlier than existing options (spreadsheets, trading logs, broker reports). You don’t have to set this up. I’ve been using this over the last few months every day I trade. I’d fire YieldKeeper up in the morning and as I entered and completed positions I tossed them into YieldKeeper with notes and screenshots. At the end of the day I went through and rated trades that I felt offered a good learning experience. If I was trading long term, I would simply slow that process down.

Trade to trade well, not to make money. Trading well requires a diligent investor who studies a continually changing market and learns from their trading activity, which is why simulating/paper trading is stressed on new and even experienced trader. Personally, I have something I call a Penalty Box. If I make 3 bad trades in a row, I’m out. I’m simulating for a day or two and that is non-negotiable. Something is wrong and I want to figure out what it is.

So here we are! I’ll announce a release date soon.

Yes, I was working on a game but I was having a brutal time designing it. The complexity started to enter a not-so-fun zone and I refuse to release something that doesn’t raise the bar above Colorflys and meet my goals for depth/fun. I’ll get back to it, or a different game design, after the following project.

I’ve been interested in finance for quite some time. It started when I came back from deployment in Iraq in 2003 and instead of spending the savings haphazardly, like many ended up doing, I jumped on board with Morgan Stanley and had a financial advisor manage it since I was new to finance and I had very little time to devote to learning it. When I left the corps in 2004 I took the money out and began managing it myself through Scottrade.

I’ve always had a problem plaguing my trading — a solid way to track how I was doing. These days my primary goal is not to make money- it’s to trade well. Study, make solid decisions about why you enter a position, set a reasonable risk/reward scenario and then execute the plan. After the plan is executed figure out what went right and what didn’t. Study more. Reduce mistakes. Visually see how you’re performing. Become a better trader. If you solely focus on making $X/day you will be in a huge bucket of pain in a market that is currently accepting plenty of prisoners.

So that brings me to YieldKeeper. Many folks, myself included, keep track of things through reports via a broker and/or an excel spreadsheet. Neither method is conducive in doing the things that I wanted. You can do some fancy things in excel but it’s going to take a lot of time to refine a solid experience and even then it’s not really good enough – I’ve done it several times and have never been happy. I wanted something that I can wedge into my process with minimal impact while allowing me to keep track of each position I go in/out of, track how I’m doing overall and give me the ability to study from my prior trades.

So in the next few weeks I’ll start introducing you to YieldKeeper. Right now I’m more concerned with tailoring a great experience than releasing it so I have no ETA on a release. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. Toss me an email if you’re a trader and would like to provide some user testing. Finally, yieldkeeper.com is live.

Q. Will this be coming to iOS?
A. I’m primarily developing this with a specific flow in mind. I remain open-minded about iOS but that isn’t the current goal.

Q. [yours here] – Feel free to contact me with any questions or things you’d like to see

After a few weeks of piecing together designs and prototypes I’ve isolated in on the next idea that will release under the iGotIt Games hood. It can be difficult to balance an idea with what is possible realistically. I can’t start a project without having a clear goal in mind and a basic idea fleshed out within several pages. I was working on a design/prototype called Monkey Vine that I was really excited about, but the more the design evolved, the more I realize it was going to be difficult to do financially – so I had to put it on the back burner. I can only invest so much into these projects, and every decision matters a mega-ton, so I need to find a design that doesn’t require so much outside work and is smart. You are measured by the decisions you make so try and make them with the best judgement that you can given your experience. Try not to beat yourself over with a hammer and make sure you’re applying what you’ve learned from your past endeavors.

A blog post I read recently enforced the idea of not chasing current trends. Well, Monkey Vine was chasing a current trend (distance games). If you can’t do something that is meaningfully different than a current trend it doesn’t make sense to follow it. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever be better or even at the same level. Monkey Vine was going to be an expensive project and I didn’t feel like it was going to offer significantly more than what was currently out there.

So, insert, -the new project name-. Back when I was in grade school I created this game with a friend on paper and played it with him all of the time. Well, during a recent run I began thinking about that paper-based game. Since we made that around 20 years ago there have been games that echo similarities, but nothing that is the same. The game will utilize the iOS 5′s turn-based multiplayer API, along with a pixelated art direction. I have adapted the game design to a couple of games that I admire (Angry Birds, Battleship) and also games that echo a simliar goal (Advance Wars). I developed a basic prototype that revolved around the core gameplay mechanic and had a few folks playtest it locally. The general consensus was that they saw potential and were excited about the future possibilities so here we go.

Today iGotIt Games signed Will Olthouse who provided an awesome pixel art concept for the game. I’m really excited to see how this game turns out with his style.

I really hope to be far more open about development of this game so feel free to follow along and throw a grenade my way if I slack off.

I’ve finally isolated a new idea worth pursuing. Megan approached me a few weeks ago with a idea revolving around a big theme on the app store right now – how far can you go? I liked the theme a lot but had a hard time pulling out interesting gameplay mechanics. I do not want to just simply create a Doodle Jump or Canabalt. I also do not want to create a shallow game. I’ve learned quite a bit through my last three projects that have given me insight that I can pull from. I feel like I have a fun design that should finally introduce some depth which I’ve neglected to implement far too much in the past. We’ll see once that early playtest session hits.

For far too long I’ve neglected ‘What makes this game good, even great?’ Normally when I play video games I don’t sit and analyze them as I play. I play them for what they are and I either enjoy the experience or I become bored and quit. I don’t moan, cry or berate the developers. I don’t sit and say, “I love this because I’m doing x, y and z!” If I become bored and quit I rarely ever touch it again. If I really enjoy the experience I might play a few more sessions over a week or two and then drop it. It is a rare case that I play a game for any serious amount of time – only a couple of MMOs (not these days, sadly) and Starcraft 2 fall into that category.

Needless to say, in the past few months I have been paying more attention to the games I’ve played.

Most recent example, Velocispider. I played this over and over because it feels smooth, the weapons are really cool, the creatures various are interesting, the graphics are easy on the eyes and I am a pretty competitive person. This game lasted a week! I don’t play it much any longer mainly because I hit a high score wall where I found it too tough to get past (after 4-5 plays of failing at the same high score spot).

The other day I came across an article, What Makes Games Good, which is an outstanding read.

Two weeks from today I launched Colorflys into the arena at $1.99 and I find myself looking at some pretty awesome things.

• Featured as New and Noteworthy and What’s Hot
• Featured as Games for Kids
• Top 10 in Kids and Top 20 in Family Games
• 1 Critic Review

It’s hard to not be excited about the list above but I find one element of it really concerning. I’ve received very, very little love from the press. I don’t know if it’s that my e-mails to them are not captivating enough, the game itself doesn’t appeal to their demographics, or that it just takes a fair amount of time to get to reviewing a game. I made the huge mistake of passing out a promotional code in the intro e-mails I sent a couple of weeks ago. The convenience that offered has provided me with nothing but concerns. So, that is, by far, the low point of the release.

Sales have been solid as far as I can tell- it was enough to keep the attention of Apple, which feels great. The sales have blown away my prior projects, which is fantastic. For the most part I just look at the numbers and ask, “Well, do I need to go get some contract work?” Yep. Not quite there, yet.

The only time the support inbox flared up was when people were having trouble playing the game because they were running an old iOS version. I completely forgot about weak linking Game Kit… I patched the issue and pushed a fast update into the store (less than a day or two after I discovered it). I also offered those affected a free game from the app store.

Some Session Stats

• iOS Version: 35% (4.2.1) | 28% (4.3.1) | 24% (4.3) | 9% (3.2.2) | 3% (3.2) | <1% (3.2.1) | <1% (4.2)
• 23% have looked at more games and 9% selected a game
• 13% have viewed the News
• 10.7% have muted the audio from within the main menu while 3% muted the audio from the game
• 9% have launched Twitter and Facebook from main menu

How is More Games working out? This is the current list of games:

• [Added 3.26][Free] Flower Garden: Launched 703 times
• [Added 3.26][Paid] Sneezies: Launched 291 times
• [Added 3.26][Paid] Cooking Dash: Launched 231 times
• [Added 4.4][Free] Pocket Frogs: Launched 191 times
• [Added 4.7][Free] Solar Spirals HD: Launched 51 times
• [Added 4.4[Paid] Big City Adventures: Launched 32 times

Out of those launches almost $600 have been purchased within the window of opportunity (with a very small base). I rotate games through as I find new ones that I like so hopefully that will keep players coming through the section.

A Little Test with the News Section

While my numbers are growing, my reviews have come to a halt. To aid the user I added a link in the news section that they touch that takes them directly to rating the game in iTunes. I put this in there a couple of days ago and of the 45 people have opened the link there have been 0 ratings.

What’s Next?

Colorflys SD is currently being put together for the iPhone/iPod and will go into playtesting soon. I’ve had my concerns with implementing Colorflys for the iPhone/iPod, but I’m going go through with it. It probably won’t be the exact same experience. I won’t find out until I playtest it.

For now I’ve opted to go through with 2 different versions instead of a universal application. I will likely price the SD version at $0.99 and keep the iPad version at $1.99. So picture $2.99 for a universal app. Boom. The core advantages I get from doing it this way is that the players will have their own domains within the leaderboards and, possibly, the experience.

This obviously can create a headache for me since I have to maintain 2 different versions, but I think the players deserve their own experience since it’s 2 completely different worlds. I QA the hell out of my projects so I’m not too concerned about duplicating bug fixing between both of them.

So that’s a little about the launch. Time to get back to it.

And we’re off to the races! I submitted the final build to Apple earlier today. So now I sit and wait for more folks to return my e-mails in regards to setting up reviews.

In the meantime I’ll start thinking about the next project.